Tuesday, August 23, 2016

The National Labor Relations Board ruled 3-1 Tuesday that
graduate students working as teaching or research assistants are entitled to
collective-bargaining rights. The case, brought forth by Columbia University
graduate students and the United Automobile Workers (which already backs the
university’s clerical workers, in addition to graduate students at New York
University and the University of Connecticut), is a reversal of a 12-year-old
ruling by the federal board.

Monday, August 8, 2016

Since student debt, free tuition and debt-free higher
education have emerged as presidential campaign-level issues, a narrative has
begun to emerge among elite news media that the rising price of college and
ever-increasing student debt are phantom problems given the overall lifetime
benefits of a college degree. Unfortunately that narrative, which has been
highlighted over the past few weeks to varying degrees by major media outlets,
including NPR and Vox, rests on a pretty narrow set of assumptions about
college and its benefits. And, in fact, it misunderstands the entire point
behind the push for debt-free public college.

For instance, a recent editorial in The Washington Post
titled “Democrats’ Loose Talk on Student Loans” makes the case that we have
more of a nuisance than a crisis on our hands. It argues that bold reforms to
address student debt -- including the plan offered up by Hillary Clinton’s
campaign -- are overkill and that we should presumably make large investments
in other areas (like paying down the national debt). Unfortunately, however,
like other news media these days, the Post editorial board appears to have
overlooked some crucial facts, many of which have been reported by its own
newspaper.

It is absolutely true that some form of postsecondary
education and training has become more important, and nearly essential, in
today’s workforce. Unemployment rates for college graduates are consistently
low, and the average lifetime earnings boost remains high relative to a high
school degree. Anyone who argues that college “isn’t worth it” is doing so with
anecdotal examples or bad data.

But the reason college is so important is not because
earnings for college graduates keep rising. In fact, bachelor’s degree holders
earn about the same amount as they did 30 years ago. Earnings for everyone else
-- including those with only some college experience -- have gone down rapidly.
In effect, a degree has become more a necessary insurance policy than an
investment.

This matters because students are now on the hook for
financing more and more of their own education than ever before. As a result,
graduates are taking on rising levels of debt while contending with stagnant
incomes and the rising cost of health care and child care, all while attempting
to save for retirement or for their own child’s education.

And they are some of the best-off of the bunch -- they’re
able to stretch and make their minimum monthly payments. The true crisis in
student loans is among those who take on student debt but do not graduate, many
of whom attend high-cost for-profit institutions. Those students are more
likely to default or become delinquent on student loans, potentially setting
themselves up for a lifetime of economic hardship. But while some argue that
what we really have is a “completion crisis,” college completion is no better
or worse than it’s been in decades.

Friday, August 5, 2016

Black Lives Matter activists have already successfully
pushed some colleges to address racism on campus and make curriculum more
inclusive. But the movement as a whole has been less visible in the K-12 space.
That’s changing.

As my colleague Vann Newkirk has noted, the Movement for Black
Lives Matter coalition recently published a platform outlining a range of
specific policies it would like to see take shape at the local, state, and
federal levels. The education proposals are rooted in the K-12 space, activists
who helped draft them told me, because the U.S. public-school system is so
broken that college is never an option for many young people of color. And
while many universities are privately controlled, the group sees an opportunity
to return control of K-12 public schools to the students, parents, and
communities they serve.

Public schools, even in the nation’s most affluent cities,
remain highly segregated, with black children disproportionately likely to
attend schools with fewer resources and concentrated poverty. There are more
school security officers than counselors in four of the 10 biggest school
districts in the country. And whereas spending on corrections increased by 324
percent between 1979 and 2013, that on education rose just 107 percent during
the same time.

The coalition’s proposals are wide-ranging and, depending on
who is talking, either aspirational or entirely unrealistic. They range from
calling for a constitutional amendment for “fully funded” education (activists
say federal funding is inadequate and not distributed equally) and a moratorium
on charter schools to the removal of police from schools and the closure of all
juvenile detention centers.

Mostly, said Jonathan Stith, the national coordinator for
the Washington-based Alliance for Educational Justice and one of the lead
authors, the propositions are an attempt to crystallize what the movement
supports and to provide activists with a platform from which to move forward.
“It’s always been clear what we’re against, but [articulating] what we’re for,
what we want to see, was a real labor,” Stith, 41, said. The document is also
an effort to connect education priorities to health care, the economy, criminal
justice, and a range of other public-policy areas, and to, as Stith put it,
force progress “in concert.”.

The plan, which lambasts the “privatization” of education by
foundations that wield fat wallets to shape policy and criticizes
charter-school networks for decimating black communities and robbing
traditional neighborhood schools of resources, drew immediate criticism from
education reformers who see charters and groups like Teach for America (the
plan calls for its demise) as providing badly needed services to students of
color. Some of these reformers said it signaled that the movement was cozy with
teachers’ unions and the status quo. Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the head of the
National Education Association, one of the country’s two main teachers’ unions,
wrote in an emailed comment, “The NEA is honored to stand in solidarity with
Black Lives Matter and proud to be a partner with the organizations that
support community-based solutions to support students and public schools.”

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Bernie Sanders may be out as a presidential contender, but
his proposal to make public college free has worked its way into Hillary
Clinton’s education plan. While the plan is making some private colleges
nervous, his campaign has succeeded in furthering a broader conversation among
university admissions directors about how to make access to higher education
more equitable.

The applicant pools at selective universities don’t
typically reflect the broader population, acknowledged Jim Rawlins, the
director of admissions and assistant vice president of enrollment management at
the University of Oregon, during a recent roundtable discussion with a handful
of other admissions leaders in Washington, D.C. The different schools in
attendance—both public and private, small and large—agreed that needs to
change.

But not all schools are convinced that making in-state
public schools free for students from families earning less than $125,000 a
year by 2021, the gist of Clinton’s plan, is the right approach. Monica Inzer,
the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid at Hamilton College,
a small private school in rural upstate New York, expressed concern that if
such a proposal were to become a reality, some families might not look at
private schools that could be a good fit and equally affordable.

As Jim Nondorf, the vice president for enrollment and
student advancement and dean of admissions and financial aid at the University
of Chicago, said, students often hear a sticker price and don’t realize the
actual cost for low- and even middle-income kids may not be as steep. His
school, for instance, offers need-blind admission and promises to meet 100
percent of a family’s demonstrated need. Hamilton eliminated merit aid in 2007,
and went completely need blind several years later. The school also runs an
emergency aid fund to help students who cannot afford to fly home to visit a
sick parent, or clothes for a job interview. But many schools, including many
historically black colleges, don’t have the funds (Hamilton’s financial aid
budget alone is more than $38 million) to accommodate such students, and losing
middle-class kids to free public schools could make supporting poor students
even harder, or force schools to take only the very richest students who can
pay full price.

“I think what would happen is, we would have to become more
elitist, because anybody who is not really wealthy is going to go to take the
free option,” Sheila Bair, the president of Washington College in Chestertown,
Maryland, told Politico recently. “I don’t want us to be elitist. I want us to
have a diverse student population.”

Monday, August 1, 2016

Albert Einstein often gets credit for words he never spoke,
including these: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not
everything that counts can be counted."

In 1963, the line appeared in the sociologist William Bruce
Cameron’s text Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological
Thinking. Two contemporary sociologists have now brought Cameron’s intuitive
wisdom to life. In their new book, Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings,
Reputation, and Accountability, Wendy Nelson Espeland, of Northwestern
University, and Michael Sauder, of the University of Iowa, have added welcome
scholarly heft to widespread anecdotal evidence that U.S. News & World
Report rankings undermine sound decision making and encourage destructive
societal behavior.

Defenders of the rankings argue that they improve
transparency and accountability. The authors suggest a more problematic impact:
Reducing any institution to a single and supposedly objective numerical slot
masks subjectivity inherent in the methodology. Even worse, rankings create
incentives that raise profound ethical issues. Espeland and Sauder prove their
argument with a case study focused on the leading edge of higher education’s
problems: law schools. Deans, professors, and prospective law students should
pay close attention. But if past is prologue, most of them won’t.

Who created this mess?

"When Mort Zuckerman acquired U.S. News & World
Report in 1984 and became its editor," the authors write, "it was a
lackluster news weekly overshadowed by its more successful rivals, Newsweek and
Time." Zuckerman — a Canadian with a law degree from McGill and master’s
of law from Harvard — pursued a business career more consistent with his M.B.A.
from Wharton. He decided to "expand the rankings and issue them annually
as a way to solidify USN’s reputation as the magazine providing ‘news you can
use.’"